We are seeking submissions for About a Bicycles’ third issue, I’m, like, in Love with You!, to be launched Autumn 2013. Our project on The Affective State has intended to historicize and contextualize our understandings of affect theory. From the get go, AAB loosely delved into the topic of affect on an experiential level, looking at embodied affective labour, the general ennui of everyday life, the selling of our selves for capital gain via work, and the effect of neoliberal precarity on our affective lives. In our last issue, we asked for anecdotal statements that spoke to these constructs and self-conceptions. With this project, we see the flows between selected texts, the way one conception of affect connects to the other (i.e., becoming-animal as a constant return) and the way others write in their own time (i.e, gendered restraint in Freud).

Our query into affect shifted registers from the philosophical to the social, bearing in mind the external causes for intense states of being and the manner in which it is embodied as an individuated affect. We read about negative and ambiguous affects (Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings), the “linguistic machine” that valorizes these prepackaged responses and narratives within capitalism (Dierdra Reber’s Headless Capitalism: Affect as free-market episteme), the oppressive weight of the morality of hegemonic identity, disillusionment, and being Other (Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Sara Ahmed’s Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness), and the nervous importance placed on repurposed feelings, seemingly designated as “women’s emotions,” which is, within “theory,” “elevated” into the realm of masculine intellect.

We are looking for submissions that respond to the texts and our discussions in experimental ways, and expand upon questions posed throughout the sessions: What is the challenge of turning to affect for critical and political thought? What is the difference between emotion, feeling, and affect? Why am I feeling this? Who is feeling this? What does/can becoming-animal look like? How can feminism recuperate paranoia (one of Ngai’s negative affects) without reproducing androcentrism? In relationship to Sarah Ahmed’s work on multiculturalism and queer theory: “How can we (contemporary people) get rid of the traumas of the past in order to be mutually and positively affected by other bodies and values, out of anxiety and fear?” How has the feminization of the subject of capital brought affect to the forefront of our discussions (see: affective labour)? How can we discuss the problematic of appropriating an essentialized feminine without throwing out the baby with the bathwater? How does the state manipulate with affects? What are the relations between ideology, desire, and affect? Explained as a mitigating motif of paranoia, what is its affective relationship to belatedness, and how does it both hinder and mobilize action? What does it mean to be late? How does affect work linguistically? What are the ways various art genres (painting, poetry, sculpture, etc.) interpolate affect theory? Where do they differ? Where do they intersect?

As posed by Ahmed: “To be affected by something is to evaluate that thing.”

Submission guidelines:

AAB publications are an extension of the culminative experience of our sessions together. The journal is another way to participate and play. Please submit something you would like to include, which could be on any of the topics discussed during the session, either explicitly or peripherally.

A submission may include: poetry, images (drawing, photography, painting, etc.), an interview, a graph, an essay, a story, a map, or anything that can be represented on paper. We ask all submissions be less than 7 pages.

All submissions must include the author’s name and title of the work, along with any additional information you would like incorporated into its representation, i.e., orientation, presentation.

Text: send all text as an .rtf or .doc file format. If there are typographical concerns or embedded text/images send a .pdf alongside the recommended format. If your submission consists of text and images, please ensure the images are embedded at 1200 dpi.